Did angler really hook one in Lake Ontario? Nope.

Some frightened fisherman on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario believe they hooked a shark last week while fishing off a dock on Wolfe Island near Kingston.(Photo: .)

Update: It's O.K., summer swimming activities can resume as normal in Lake Ontario, according to a press release put out on behalf of the Discovery channel. The widely-circulated video of a shark swimming in Lake Ontario is, in fact, not a real shark. The video of the life-like prosthetic model shark is the first stage of a multi-level marketing campaign tied to the channel's summer event, Shark Week. Released on YouTube last Friday, the video has since gone viral getting 220,000 views so far, according to the release. Of course, we were never completely hooked that the video was real .... see blog post from yesterday below.

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Some frightened fishermen on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario believe they hooked a shark last week while fishing off a dock on Wolfe Island near Kingston.

Yes, a shark. So they say. So too says a cell-phone video that -- if you choose to believe it -- shows the failed attempt to land what appears to be a large fish. A very large fish. With visible teeth.

Could it be a hoax? Sure. Is it? I have no idea. The video looks real enough. The geography is at least plausible: Fish can and do swim upstream from the Atlantic Ocean into the St. Lawrence; Wolfe Island is at the point where Lake Ontario empties into the river.

Some have noted that bull sharks, which are aggressive and more dangerous to humans than most other sharks, can and do live in freshwater river systems. There's been speculation that that's what this was; this website has commentary in which someone who knows something about sharks agrees that it could have been a bull. Others are saying catfish or porpoise.

Do not be suckered, as I momentarily was, by other news reports that a bull shark was pulled from the St. Lawrence River last year. That one seems to be an April Fool's Day hoax.

Was this one a hoax, or was it real? We'll see. Maybe an answer will come from one of the dozens of fishing vessels I picture pulling out of the harbor at Wolfe Island, each overloaded with shark fishermen eager to snare the prize. Let's hope they remember that fateful advice: If it really is a bull shark, you're gonna need a bigger boat.